Booked 5 hour tour with extended family of 11. According to listing, that’ll be the right amount of time for 2 sites, Rose Island and Green Cay. Unfortunately, we only made it to Rose Island and ran out of time.
We brought our mother along whom suddenly lost the mobility of her left leg a couple of weeks ago. It took about 20 minutes to lift her onto the catamaran. We appreciated Captain Ignacio for accommodating her, but that was about it. Instead of trying to make up lost time, we moved very slowly towards Rose Island at cruising speed, while every other boat zoomed past us at 2-3x the speed, a couple of them were similar catamarans. My brother asked Captain Ignacio a couple of times why we were just cruising slowly but couldn’t get a straight answer.
After cruising for about 1.5 hours we finally reached Rose Island. We docked close to a reef and snorkeled. After we were done, I asked the Captain when we’ll be heading to Green Cay. That’s when I was told that we wouldn’t have time because of the 1/2 hour we spent boarding my mother. Well, I take full responsibility of the delay and we could’ve cut down our time at Rose island if needed be, but Captain Ignacio never discussed our options. He simply made a decision unilaterally and forgot to tell us.
I was shocked but tried to salvage the situation by offering overtime. Captain Ignacio estimated 1.5 hour of extra time (he said it’ll be 1 hour from Rose Island to Green Cay and 1+ hour from Green Cay back to Paradise island). He strongly recommended we stayed at Rose Island and we listened.
We did some research after we returned. Learned that Rose Island is only 3 miles east of Paradise Island and a 25 minutes boat ride (took us about 1.5 hours).
And the infuriating part? This is word for word from Google: “Green Cay is located extremely close to Rose island in the Bahamas. The two cays are separated by just a few miles of water, making the boat ride between them a very short 5 to 10-minute cruise”. And the good Captain told us 1 hour so that he wouldn’t have to take us there!!!
This is also from Google: Green Cay is located just 4 miles east of Paradise Island and a typical boat charter or excursion takes about 15-20 minutes. Again, the good Captain told us 1 hour. (Our return from Rose Island was slightly faster than outbound but still took about an hour).
We paid a large sum for this charter and the extra hour to visit Green Cay costs $600. We didn’t get that. The Mad Curl is a newer and very capable catamaran. I can only speculate that we only traveled at cruising speeds (and used up the bulk of our 5-hour charter) because Captain Ignacio tried to conserve fuel. He probably canceled Green Cay for the same reason. He misrepresented all the information so that we would agree with his decision. Given today’s high diesel prices, Captain Ignacio definitely saved a few hundred bucks of fuel, at our expense.
Booked 5 hour tour with extended family of 11. According to listing, that’ll be the right amount of time for 2 sites, Rose...